Chapter 8: GPS Clustering and Analytics Location information is crucial for analyzing sensor data and health inferences from mobile and wearable devices. For example, let us say you monitored your stress levels throughout the day and wanted to visualize the data. Location and time is crucial to analyzing the data --- for example, you might detect that stress is highest at work rather than home, or that stress is highest in evenings. But how do you take location data, and visualize it in a way that makes it possible for you to draw such conclusions? If you took all the points where you took measurements and plotted it on a map (such as in the figure on the left), it wouldn’t be particularly meaningful. It would be quite useless to tell someone, “You were at 33.93885N, 84.33697W at 5pm on 3/17/2014 ”. Clearly, we need a more logical way to find points that an individual might consider significant is to look at where the individual spends her time. For example, the figure on the right shows a logical representation of the location data, where locations have been clustered into logical places. Here, the size of the clusters show how much time you spent in a particular logical place -- you spent a lot of time in the CS building and at the Dorm. The lines between the clusters show how you typically moved between places -- you typically go from your Dorm to Amherst downtown rather than from the CS department to Amherst downtown. Once you have such a representation, you can overlay the data with information about other parameters like heart rate (higher at the gym, presumably), and so on. But how do we go from the raw data plotted on the left to the logical place representation shown on the right? In this chapter, we provide some ideas on how to cluster raw GPS data into meaningful places. Clustering location data Before we launch into the algorithm, let us start by looking at the challenges that one faces while clustering GPS data. ● Noise : GPS data is noisy. You might be standing at the same location, but GPS readings can be off by several meters. The GPS error depends on numerous factors including the number of satellites visible to the device, indoor vs outdoor environment, tall buildings in the vicinity, weather, and GPS device characteristics. In clustering GPS data to determine the significant places, care needs to be taken to filter this data. ● Meaningful clusters : One of the major challenges is identifying which GPS co-ordinates correspond to “meaningful” clusters. For example, there may be GPS points recorded while you
are driving on the freeway, but you are less likely to be interested in freeway than work or home. So, we need a way to identify meaningful clusters, and discard irrelevant ones. ● Semantic location : While clustering is useful, the ultimate goal is to get semantic location i.e. Home, Work, Coffee Shop, etc rather than Cluster 1 and Cluster 2. So, another challenge is how we convert from clusters to places. GPS Clustering We are going to address these problems in three phases. First, we pre-process data to filter out noisy readings, to reduce the number of readings, and to remove readings that correspond to meaningless locations. Second, we are going to use one of the most common clustering algorithms, referred to as k- means, to cluster the remaining data points. Third, we are going to convert from clusters to semantic locations. Phase 1: Pre-processing (removing noise and outliers) The pre-processing step has the following goals: a) remove noisy data, b) remove meaningless points where you did not spend sufficient time, c) reduce the amount of GPS data that a clustering algorithm (dbscan or k-means) has to process in-order to speed it up. 1. Remove low density points : We look for points that have few neighbors --- in other words, it doesn’t look like you spent substantial enough time in tha t location to be worthwhile to process. For example, you could choose a radius of 20 meters, and threshold of at least 50 neighbors within the 20 meter threshold. Assuming that you were collecting GPS data once a minute, that means that you want to have spent at least 50 minutes in that location, else it is not something that you care about. This approach also filters out noisy readings that are far out since these points will have few neighbors. 2. Remove points with movement . GPS returns speed in addition to co-ordinates. If speed > 0 (or something small, like 0.1), then discard the GPS point. This makes sure that you don’t process data while you are walking or driving, which we are not interested in. (Note that if you are interested in travel patterns, you may want to keep data involving movement, but this is not important for identifying semantic locations, which is our objective) 3. Reduce data for stationary locations . When you are stationary (e.g. sitting at a chair), your GPS location will not change for a long time. This will result in too many redundant points that you need to process, which will slow down any clustering algorithm (e.g. k-means). You can address this by not storing points where the change from the previously stored location is less than a small threshold (e.g. 1 meter). Note that you may not want to remove too many such samples, since otherwise it can change the k-means clustering result too much. Try running k-means without this step, and only use this method if you find that it is too slow! Phase II: Clustering There are many methods for clustering GPS points into semantic locations. We will describe two such approaches in this document - k-means clustering and DBSCAN clustering.
K-means Clustering The key parameter that you have to select for k-means is k , the number of clusters. You may typically choose k based on the number of clusters you expect in the data, perhaps you expect about 10 clusters as the places where you typically stay in a day. Given k , the k-means algorithm consists of an iterative algorithm with four steps. 1. Select K initial centroids at random from the points. 2. repeat a. Assign each object to the cluster with the nearest centroid (in terms of distance). b. Re-compute each centroid as the mean of the objects assigned to it. 3. until centroids do not change. While this algorithm sometimes produces suboptimal clusterings, it is fast and really easy to to implement. Lets look at a simple SQL implementation (from Joni Salonen [2]). Suppose we have some location data, already geocoded into latitude-longitude pairs, and we want to find clusters of locations that lie close to each other. We’ll use two tables, gps_data to store the data and the cluster assigned to each point, and gps_clusters for the cluster centers: create table gps_data (id int primary key, cluster_id int, lat double, lng double); create table gps_clusters (id int auto_increment primary key, lat double, lng double); The K-means algorithm can now be implemented with the following procedure. DELIMITER // CREATE PROCEDURE kmeans(v_K int) BEGIN TRUNCATE gps_clusters; -- initialize cluster centers INSERT INTO gps_clusters (lat, lng) SELECT lat, lng FROM gps_data LIMIT v_K; REPEAT -- assign clusters to data points UPDATE gps_data d SET cluster_id = (SELECT id FROM gps_clusters c ORDER BY POW(d.lat-c.lat,2)+POW(d.lng-c.lng,2) ASC LIMIT 1); -- calculate new cluster center UPDATE gps_clusters C, (SELECT cluster_id, AVG(lat) AS lat, AVG(lng) AS lng FROM gps_data GROUP BY cluster_id) D SET C.lat=D.lat, C.lng=D.lng WHERE C.id=D.cluster_id; UNTIL ROW_COUNT() = 0 END REPEAT; END// The above code should be quite useful for your assignment as well…
To the right is a sample of the output, based on address data: While K-means is simple and effective, it has limitations that one needs to be aware of. Differing sizes : K-means clustering assumes that cluster are roughly similarly sized, so if you have clusters where you expect variable sizes, K-means may not do so well in separating them. An example is shown below. The original points separate into three clusters of unequal size, but the clustered points on the right have a more even distribution. Differing density : If the clusters have very different density in points, it can cause an issue for K-means clustering, which relies on the centroid of the points in-order to separate into clusters. The example below shows an instance where the original points (left) have one low-density cluster and two high- density clusters. This is clearly visible to the naked eye, but when K-means clusters points, it splits the low-density points to two clusters and combines the high-density clusters into one. This is a limitation of the use of the centroid of the points as the clustering metric.
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